Twitter… what happens next

[Werthead]

Twitter has an outsized impact and reach that far exceeds the direct users of its platform who are, as is often said, minuscule in comparison to the daily users of Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. However, it is far huger than most media outlets and it allows people to talk directly to the world, and those statements can then be reprinted in traditional media venues. That's actually the biggest problem Twitter has, in that a very famous person can say something on Twitter that reaches 100 million people directly, but 500 million people hear about it via other news outlets. Because tweets are so short, it's very easy to repeat the message outside the Twitter platform, which is pretty useless for Twitter in terms of making money but handy for people wanting their message amplified, and public interest laws makes it impossible for Twitter to refuse to allow people to reprint tweets in full.

That's why people saying "Twitter isn't real life," and "it's not that important to normal people," are both wrong and unhelpful: Twitter has a very verifiable impact on real life, real politics and real issues, and "normal" people are impacted in turn by issues raised on or through Twitter.

Perhaps Twitter imploding because it's very difficult to monetise might overall be for the best (apart possibly from for Musk, who will be left in serious debt to the Saudi government), but there is a powerful idea at the heart of it that maybe someone else will get right (maybe even Dorsey himself with his new venue; how the hell Musk didn't get on a non-compete clause I don't know).

More interesting is the fact that the younger generations have very little interest in either Twitter or Facebook and get their news and information from elsewhere, like YouTube (which has its own problems) and TikTok (which is a lot more of a chaotic no man's land at the moment and older uses seem a lot less interested in using it).

[Jace, Extat]

27 minutes ago, Ran said:

In Marxist thought, degradation of service is merely a byproduct of the failure of the proletariat to serve the public weal and therefore the beatings must continue until morale improves.

Indeed. How they must weep upon their billions, eh?

Failure = cash buyout

Quite a scam. 

But hey, that public pr'bly gonna get serviced at some point maybe? After they're done leaving for Mars, surely. 

Also, I LOVE that you people think the 'services' you use are to your, well, weal-being. (See what I did there?) 

Twitter is tables. Because without tables, we wouldn't have chairs. And without chairs, orphans in Africa wouldn't be able to be seen sitting in classes which makes you feel better about yourself, because you're glad they have tables and chairs too. Because Twitter is tables and chairs and everything everywhere all the time. That's how you know it's good for you.

[DMC]

Yeah I have to agree with the "capitalistic" rationale that something will replace at least the good aspects of Twitter should it go under.  I don't think we should be viewing Twitter or any other social media platform as public goods.  Whether they're publicly or privately owned, they're still a company whose business model can be readily replicated and/or tweaked.

Also, let's not act like there aren't downsides to Twitter in regards to public discourse as well - and were well before Musk got involved. 

[Ran]

20 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Because on those platforms coups and treason were not called for, and planned to, bring down legitimate elections and governments.  On twitter, they are.  There wasn't howling anti-semitic crowds on those platforms.  There wasn't you name it, all of which goes on bigger and bigger on twitter.  MySpace didn't have a POTUS who declared a global pandemic a hoax, told people to take horse worm medicine and NOT get vaccinated.  We can go on.

All of those things happened on MySpace and Yahoo's email groups and so on. Well, not the POTUS hoax thing, but in any case, maybe I've an unusually long memory, but I recall people wringing their hands about the impact of disinformation and fringe groups forming thanks to the internet way back in 1998, much less now.

Like this piece notes, Twitter didn't even exist a few year ago. It is not now suddenly indispensable or guaranteed to be around forever. In all likelihood it will be eventually supplanted, and soon after that people will wonder why they cared so much about it, just as I'm sure there are people who shake their head at MySpace or ICQ.

 

[polishgenius]

I don't think anyone thinks twitter wouldn't eventually be replaced if it goes under. The concern is for what and how.


I also don't think MySpace is a very comparable example. MySpace got killed by a direct competitor, Facebook, that did more-or-less the things it did in a way that people preferred. That isn't, at this point, happening for twitter, there isn't a microblogging/mass-public-discourse platform with anything like its reach to step into its shoes. That's why people are looking for replacements and not flocking to the one that exists. 

Vine-to-TikTok is a more direct analogy but Vine lasted three years, for all its popularity it didn't have the time to be as entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist as twitter has. Also, it was killed, on purpose, pretty instantaneously, so there was much more oomph behind the wave of users looking for its replacement.

[felice]

31 minutes ago, Ran said:

Like this piece notes, Twitter didn't even exist a few year ago.

I've been there for 12 years, and I wasn't an early adopter. It's been around for a lot of users' entire adult lives, and for some users since before they were born.

[Wade1865]

1 hour ago, JGP said:

Eh, FB figured the super-app direction was the wave of the future, ergo META.

FB is down like what, 600 billion or something since? No one wants everything everywhere from one thing, unless it's on their phone.

JGP -- yes, and that's exactly what I want as a consumer; consolidation and convenience. Does the West in general want that, though?

If any conglomerate has a chance at building a successful super app in the West, I'd think it would be Meta and its family of apps. Mark's effort to align those apps with the metaverse (via Horizon Worlds) doesn't anticipate success until further down the road, if Meta can survive that long. For now, investors are angry and Meta's valuation destruction shows it (along with other factors), hahaha.

Elon's chances at building his own super app would most likely be lower, but he's starting simple with a social platform and seems to want to add a banking / payment function. First, he acquired the population; then, he'll provide the services. Integrate these efforts with something called X, which is supposed to be Elon's "everything" app, and you can see he's attempting what Meta has already started (but without its own version of Horizon Worlds, I hope). What both men are doing seems to be in line with how the Asian super apps evolved.

[DMC]

16 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I don't think anyone thinks twitter wouldn't eventually be replaced if it goes under. The concern is for what and how.

While neither of the comparisons are perfect, of course, you also have to consider that Twitter is not going to "go under" overnight either.  It is much more likely to gradually die off, giving ample time for replacements to emerge and compete with it (and each other) as a platform.  And it also may well be the case, as I believe Kal mentioned, that its "impact" is balkanized.  Thus we have an academic twitter, a journalist twitter, a sports twitter, etc.  But, if that's the case, I suppose my question is, so?

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

While neither of the comparisons are perfect, of course, you also have to consider that Twitter is not going to "go under" overnight either.  It is much more likely to gradually die off, giving ample time for replacements to emerge and compete with it (and each other) as a platform.  And it also may well be the case, as I believe Kal mentioned, that its "impact" is balkanized.  Thus we have an academic twitter, a journalist twitter, a sports twitter, etc.  But, if that's the case, I suppose my question is, so?

So...Balkanization of apps sucks for users and results in less fun conversations and interactions, steeper learning curves and less overall accessibility with often more gatekeepers. If that's the 'good' outcome that kinda sucks for people who are enjoying using twitter as it is; it'd be like breaking up facebook to have a facebook for just your family, another for your friends, another for cat videos and another for politics. It's doable, but not particularly good. 

The other other problem is the actual damage that the shitshow of Twitter does before it goes out. Facebook managed to facilitate an actual genocide, and that was largely by incompetence and accident; what does something at that scale do when you've actually got someone malicious and incompetent in charge? Like I said above the least bad thing that can happen is that twitter quickly dies. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

So...Balkanization of apps sucks for users and results in less fun conversations and interactions, steeper learning curves and less overall accessibility with often more gatekeepers. If that's the 'good' outcome that kinda sucks for people who are enjoying using twitter as it is; it'd be like breaking up facebook to have a facebook for just your family, another for your friends, another for cat videos and another for politics. It's doable, but not particularly good. 

I'm unclear on how "balkanization" leads to less overall accessibility with more gatekeepers.  The rest of this doesn't seem that bad to me at all.  It's like complaining about the proliferation of streaming companies.

[Spockydog]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Twitter is not that important. 

It's only Dog Twitter keeping me from jumping into the Thames.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Twitter sucks in general and it's already easy to get around some of their blockers. Charging $8 a month will lead to a very small pool of payers that over the long run probably won't make of the difference of running the site.

Elon is very talented in a few ways, but he's not actually a particularly good businessman and the safe bet is that this endeavor of his fails, probably within two years. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 minute ago, Spockydog said:

It's only Dog Twitter keeping me from jumping into the Thames.

 

Start DogBook, where people have to pay $12 a year to look at other people's dogs. You'll make a fortune. 

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, DMC said:

I'm unclear on how "balkanization" leads to less overall accessibility with more gatekeepers.  The rest of this doesn't seem that bad to me at all.  It's like complaining about the proliferation of streaming companies.

The proliferation of streaming companies without things like unified guides and having to remember where things are at any given time does actually suck. People are liking it less and less. It was great when it was Netflix; it was not great when it was a few things; it's become really shitty now that there are like 10 streaming channels and they weirdly swap shows every few months. 

As to the balkanization leading to less accessibility - it means that each small fiefdom has its own UI, its own behaviors, its own rules to follow, its own set of gatekeepers. Individual mods and runners of each system have more overall power over those fiefdoms. When you have a one size fits all system you tend to by effective rule require more overall moderation which means less abuse, more welcoming, etc. When you don't, well, you get things like 4chan. 

Imagine if instead of one site there were hundreds of sites run by Ran-like people. All of them with various versions of forum software, various restrictions, various commenting requirements, various personal viewpoints, etc. If you want to join that community you have to learn its rules and systems and abide by the posting goals for it. That is automatically harder for most users. It's why we don't have that nearly as much as we used to Back In The Day. That is emphatically not what most people actually want. 

If you're okay with that I guess that's cool, but it is not particularly good for most people. 

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The proliferation of streaming companies without things like unified guides and having to remember where things are at any given time does actually suck. People are liking it less and less. It was great when it was Netflix; it was not great when it was a few things; it's become really shitty now that there are like 10 streaming channels and they weirdly swap shows every few months. 

Well, I guess my point there is that people adapt and it clearly hasn't hurt the industry - nor the quality of content - as a whole.  At least in my view.

5 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

As to the balkanization leading to less accessibility - it means that each small fiefdom has its own UI, its own behaviors, its own rules to follow, its own set of gatekeepers. Individual mods and runners of each system have more overall power over those fiefdoms. When you have a one size fits all system you tend to by effective rule require more overall moderation which means less abuse, more welcoming, etc. When you don't, well, you get things like 4chan. 

This seems like a classic "trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away" line of argument, which isn't very persuasive to me.  And there's every possibility that if there was an "academic" or "journalistic" twitter, they may well be more "open" and efficiently run/moderated that just having a huge conglomerate.

I suppose when I think of the "open accessibility" aspect and its benefits I think of the Arab Spring and Twitter's impact therein.  Thing is, though, 2011 Twitter was far less ubiquitous and wide-reaching than 2022 Twitter, and obviously it still worked.  That's why I remain skeptical of this argument.

Also, in terms of what's "good" for most people, as was mentioned above by Wert I think, a lot of Twitter's outsized impact is secondhand.  I don't have a Twitter account, so I can only read a handful of posts in any given thread before I get a prompt asking me to create an account/sign in.  This is the case for many if not most people, and another reason the "open accessibility/gatekeepers" argument rings hollow to me.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Well, I guess my point there is that people adapt and it clearly hasn't hurt the industry - nor the quality of content - as a whole.  At least in my view.

I guess I disagree, especially given how far Netflix has gone downhill and how niche a lot of the providers have been. Plus, honestly? It's a major pain in the ass. All I want to do is watch Top Chef - why do I now need another streaming service to watch it when I was watching it on Hulu a month ago? Bah. 

1 minute ago, DMC said:

This seems like a classic "trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away" line of argument, which isn't very persuasive to me.  And there's every possibility that if there was an "academic" or "journalistic" twitter, they may well be more "open" and efficiently run/moderated that just having a huge conglomerate.

I think that's fair! Especially academic ones, though probably not journalistic ones. That may even be for the best mind you - having a relatively restrictive all-verified as journalist place is kinda compelling as a thought experiment. But a lot of the other stuff - especially things like politicians, entertainers, various joke threads, personal connections - that all ends up potentially sucking. Imagine if you wanted to follow certain musicians and you could only get them on the SonyTwitter, and then you also had to follow DisneyTwitter for other actors, and BMGTwitter for others. 

This is a common complaint about the problems with leaving facebook too, mind you - there isn't just one place that you can keep up with your family and keep up with your college friends and keep up with work friends and follow various local things, and no one agrees on where they want to meet. The Mastodon idea has some compelling value here but it's early and still may have problems. 

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I suppose when I think of the "open accessibility" aspect and its benefits I think of the Arab Spring and Twitter's impact therein.  Thing is, though, 2011 Twitter was far less ubiquitous and wide-reaching than 2022 Twitter, and obviously it still worked.  That's why I remain skeptical of this argument.

Also, in terms of what's "good" for most people, as was mentioned above by Wert I think, a lot of Twitter's outsized impact is secondhand.  I don't have a Twitter account, so I can only read a handful of posts in any given thread before I get a prompt asking me to create an account/sign in.  This is the case for many if not most people, and another reason the "open accessibility/gatekeepers" argument rings hollow to me.

I don't see signing in as that big of a barrier especially when there is literally no other requirement to do so. I get the same thing for instagram too, and while that's annoying it isn't particularly not accessible. Compare that to creating accounts on new forums where there can be significant rules on seeing posts, creating posts, etc and it's miles apart. 

The Arab Spring is a good example of what Twitter can do and how it had a secondary effect. The Ukraine war is another big one right now. The Iranian protests this year too. It could be done elsewhere or with some other app; in theory Telegram could do it but for whatever reason it hasn't been as successful, and Telegram also has like zero global moderation so it really is the wild west. The other thing to note is that twitter really hasn't increased that much since 2011 - it's basically doubled in users since then. 100m users is still pretty large as far as ubiquity goes. The reduction into smaller sub categories would significantly cut that down. 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

But a lot of the other stuff - especially things like politicians, entertainers, various joke threads, personal connections - that all ends up potentially sucking. Imagine if you wanted to follow certain musicians and you could only get them on the SonyTwitter, and then you also had to follow DisneyTwitter for other actors, and BMGTwitter for others. 

This is a common complaint about the problems with leaving facebook too, mind you - there isn't just one place that you can keep up with your family and keep up with your college friends and keep up with work friends and follow various local things, and no one agrees on where they want to meet. The Mastodon idea has some compelling value here but it's early and still may have problems. 

Yeah, I think this is fair.  Any balkanization would certainly be much more of an annoyance to committed/frequent users of Twitter.  My perspective here in terms of it being "bad," though, is would it be a "societal" bad.  Or restrict the aspects of Twitter that are societal "goods."  And in that case I just don't see it.  I mean, maybe -- but it's also just as likely maybe not.  And moreover, it's just as likely Twitter could devolve in the future in these respects with or without Musk.  Again, they're a company, not a public good.

5 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The Arab Spring is a good example of what Twitter can do and how it had a secondary effect.

Right, my point there is I think a balkanized replacement could do the same thing as Twitter did in 2011.  Or at least I don't see why it couldn't.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah, I think this is fair.  Any balkanization would certainly be much more of an annoyance to committed/frequent users of Twitter.  My perspective here in terms of it being "bad," though, is would it be a "societal" bad.  Or restrict the aspects of Twitter that are societal "goods."  And in that case I just don't see it.  I mean, maybe -- but it's also just as likely maybe not.  And moreover, it's just as likely Twitter could devolve in the future in these respects with or without Musk.  Again, they're a company, not a public good.

Right, my point there is I think a balkanized replacement could do the same thing as Twitter did in 2011.  Or at least I don't see why it couldn't.

That seems reasonable. I do think a balkanized system would be less dangerous, though it could in theory lead to cesspools of radicalization similar to 8chan and other shitty places. But it would not have the overall general spreadability. It would kind of suck for a consumer though. It also would still be hard to replace the newsiness of things; me sharing something that I see to my friends, my family members, some people who follow me because of Oregon fandom, some others from this board - and I see it because I follow some pols, some comedians, some OSINT folks, some tech folks, and a couple of randomly weird people - that kind of synergy doesn't really happen. It means more isolated news sources and niche programming, more subjective truth, etc. 

And that's why a balkanized twitter can't do as much as a smaller twitter did in 2011. Because it's unlikely 100m people are subscribing to any one of those things, and it's unlikely that you have the virality to expand. Virality happens due to large sparse networks of people and that's basically logarithmic in scaling. Something is significantly less likely to go nuts with 10m people as 100m people available, and even worse if it's just 1m. Westeros.org rarely produces information that other people link to, but it regularly features links. 

[DMC]

9 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

And that's why a balkanized twitter can't do as much as a smaller twitter did in 2011.

Well, I disagree with this, but otherwise we seem to be in agreement on most things, or at least have reached a detente.  

[Jace, Extat]

1 hour ago, Wade1865 said:

JGP -- yes, and that's exactly what I want as a consumer; consolidation and convenience. Does the West in general want that, though?

If any conglomerate has a chance at building a successful super app in the West, I'd think it would be Meta and its family of apps. Mark's effort to align those apps with the metaverse (via Horizon Worlds) doesn't anticipate success until further down the road, if Meta can survive that long. For now, investors are angry and Meta's valuation destruction shows it (along with other factors), hahaha.

Elon's chances at building his own super app would most likely be lower, but he's starting simple with a social platform and seems to want to add a banking / payment function. First, he acquired the population; then, he'll provide the services. Integrate these efforts with something called X, which is supposed to be Elon's "everything" app, and you can see he's attempting what Meta has already started (but without its own version of Horizon Worlds, I hope). What both men are doing seems to be in line with how the Asian super apps evolved.

"X" 

He means to construct cerebro. Good for him. I'm sure he will use it as wisely and well-ly as Professor...

 

 

Without change something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.